CAIDA : tools : taxonomy : visualization

Internet Visualization Tool Taxonomy

Name	Source	Cost	Dependencies	Summary
ADVISOR	Visual Insights	commercial (contact company for pricing)	components for custom tools	ADVIZOR enables companies to add visual query and analysis solutions to their existing decision support infrastructure, and create and deploy interactive visual analysis applications and application templates.
Cichlid (pronounced sik'-lid)	NLANR/MOAT	free, src available	standalone tool	Designed for rapidly visualizing arbitrary data sets in high-quality 3D, while allowing the viewer to explore and interact with the data sets in real time.
GeoBoy2	NDG Software	commercial (contact company for pricing)	standalone tool	A complete Internet connection manager and 3D visualization tool designed for users concerned with monitoring web access, Internet traffic and ISP connectivity options.
Graphviz	Stephen North, AT&T Research	free, src available	components for tool building	A set of graph drawing tools for Unix or MS-Windows (win32). Designed for visualizing structural information by constructing geometric representations of abstract graphs and networks.
HP OpenView Network Management Solution	HP OpenView	commercial (contact company for pricing)	standalone tools	Several tools for network monitoring and simulation, including visualizations of monitored networks and graphical real-time displays of activity.
MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher)	Tobias Oetiker	free, src available	standalone tool	A tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. Generates HTML pages containing GIF images which provide a live visual representation of this traffic.
NAM	VINT	free, src available	standalone tool	A Tcl/TK based animation tool for viewing network simulation traces and real world packet traces. It supports topology layout, packet level animation, and various data inspection tools. See research using nam.
NetBoy	NDG Software	commercial (contact company for pricing)	suite of tools	A complete real-time visual Internet and LAN network monitoring suite.
NetMaker	Make Systems	commercial (contact company for pricing)	standalone tools	NetMaker tools and Network Planning processes are designed to help customers with network planning, traffic analysis, engineering and modeling needs. Customers purchase only the tools and plug-ins that solve their specific needs.
Otter	CAIDA	free, src available	standalone tool	A general purpose Java applet that can (theoretically) display any type of networking data, using various layout methods/modules, provided the user defines the dataset and attributes in an Otter-compatible file format.
Pajek	Vladimir Batagelj, Andrej Mrvar University of Ljubljani	free	standalone tool	A program package, for Windows 95/NT, for analyzing large networks (networks having thousands of vertices). The program is freely available, for noncommercial use.
Plankton	CAIDA	free, src available	standalone tool	Plankton offers a visualization of the international cache topology as seen from the perspective of the NLANR root caches.
RRD Tool with frontends Orca and Cricket	RRD Tool: Tobias Oetiker Orca: Blair Zajac Cricket: Jeff Allen	free, src available	standalone with frontends available	Round Robin Database (RRD) is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average). To help with organization of data acquisition and presentation, the frontends Orca and Cricket have been developed.
Scotty	Juergen Schoenwaelder	free, src available	framework for custom tools	Scotty is a software package which allows users to implement site-specific network management software using high-level, string-based APIs.
Tom Sawyer Toolkits	Tom Sawyer Software	commercial (contact company for pricing)	components for custom tools	Customizable graph layout and diagramming toolkits for integration into other applications. A number of graph layout algorithms and graph editing tools are available.
VisualRoute	Datametrics Systems Corporation	commercial, $29	standalone tool	a visual integrated ping, whois, and traceroute program that displays the results on a world map, with additional textual information to help analyze connectivity problems.
WhatRoute	Bryan Christianson (IHUG)	free	standalone tool	A Macintosh, Open Transport implementation of traceroute, ping, DNS Query, Finger and Whois.
Viznet	NLANR/DAST	free, src available	standalone tool	A Java application to visualize network bandwidth performance over time.
Xtraceroute	Bjorn Augustsson, NDG Software	free, src available	standalone tool (requires graphics toolkits)	A graphical version of traceroute, displayed on a rotating globe as a series of yellow lines between 'sites', shown as small balls of different colors.